"This is the baseball."

“If you ain’t first, you’re last”

Last place, unappealing as it is, at least comes with a certain amount of clarity. Because at least we can say that what’s happened to the Indians these last couple months is not just jaw-dropping or bewildering or perplexing. It’s borderline historic.

Perhaps you’ve seen the note that only three teams in baseball history have been in first place after 70 games and gone on to finish last — the 1991 Angels, the 2005 Nationals and the 2006 Rockies.

Now, granted, the season is not over, and the Indians might not finish last in the AL Central. They might not even be in last by the time you read this.

But even those Angels and those Nats wound up with 81 wins, while the Rox finished with 76. These Indians, whether they finish last or not, clearly aren’t going to wind up with 76 wins or anything close to it. They are on pace to lose 95 games.

As I write this, the Indians are in last… with a caveat. The Twins are in last, too. But the Indians are 5-10 against those Twins, so consider that a tiebreaker.

This is an abomination, and it doesn’t even matter what the “right” moves are. The Indians have to consider the drastic ones.

Some will say that should start with a purge of Manny Acta and the coaching staff at season’s end, if not sooner (though many of those same people will want bench coach Sandy Alomar Jr. installed as the skipper). As rational as I try to be in this space, as much as I know a managerial change won’t change much, who am I to disagree? Heck, at this point, a dismissal might be merciful.

(This Jon Heyman report has Acta on the hot seat. As you know, Paul Dolan said a few weeks back that everybody, Acta included, was safe. But obviously those votes of confidence can go south. Besides, Dolan said that at Acta’s charity bowling function. That wouldn’t exactly seem a reasonable time to talk publicly about his performance being under scrutiny… unless, of course, you wanted to invite speculation that Acta’s on the outs if he rolls anything less than a 200.)

Nobody has been a bigger supporter of the energy level and insight Acta has brought to this club than me. Frankly, on a personal level, as a media member, I love dealing with the guy. And I can’t fault him for falling short with a flawed roster. (In fact, Baseball Reference’s Pythagorean W-L calculation estimates that these Indians should actually be five games worse than they are right now. So if you think this is bad, well….)

But who could possibly muster an artful defense of Acta and his coaches now that the Indians have won just nine of their last 43?

Wait… does that sound dramatic enough? Let’s try this again: The Indians have lost 34 of 43.

No, no, that still doesn’t quite capture it. Let’s try this: The Indians have been losing roughly eight out of every 10 games… for seven weeks.

There, I think that did it.

And while this is an issue that goes beyond coaching and beyond preparation and ultimately comes down to talent level (or lack thereof), maybe at some point you do have to send a message to your players and, yes, to your fan base that, hey, we’re going to try doing something differently, even if it can be construed as change for the sake of change.

Has Acta lost the clubhouse? Have the players stopped caring or trying? Or are they really just this bad a baseball team?

“I don’t get any sense that the guys are just finishing out the string. The balance of the year is still important to everybody. We still have mostly a very young team that is looking to establish themselves as Major League players. Everybody still has something to play for.”

So… are you picking up on that supposed sense of urgency when you watch this team play?

Those are not some young guys in an audition or guys getting innings and at-bats out of desperation. Those are your purported anchors, your purported building blocks in the rotation and in the lineup. And aside from Santana (whose numbers are not great but are at least an improvement on his season tally), they have all regressed — in some cases, quite significantly — down the stretch (and in the cases of Masterson and Jimenez, this is regression on top of regression).

Whether that’s an issue between the lines or between the ears is probably case-specific, but one has to wonder about the overall focus level in that clubhouse right now.

But if the Indians are, indeed, going to focus on change, it has to extend beyond the coaching staff and beyond the trade department, where the markets, however limited, for Choo, Chris Perez, Cabrera, Masterson and Jimenez must, at the least, be explored this winter.

On the heels of the 11 straight losses in early August, Antonetti said it was “possible” that the Indians’ evaluators had overrated their pitching. I think we can go ahead and update that to “probable,” and the overrating quite obviously extends to some amateur and trade acquisitions on both the pitching and position player front over the years.

I don’t think it’s unfair to say Antonetti has had a brutal 14 months, dating back to the Ubaldo trade. The budget is not all that’s held the Indians back in 2012, and neither is a lack of luck.

Antonetti’s job is still expected to be safe at season’s end, and indeed he’s built up a good deal of collateral in his 13 years in this organization. But it might do the Indians well to get some new blood in the evaluative and developmental mix to pair with Antonetti and Co. Fresh ideas, new ways of scouting talent or analyzing data. Because while many of the criticisms thrust at this front office the past decade have been unfair, the criticisms start to carry more weight when a rebuild goes wrong. And aside from a 30-15 spurt of unexpected brilliance at the beginning of 2011 and contention-by-default in a bad division at the outset of 2012, very little has gone right here since the 2009 purge.

The current standings allow us to sum it all up in clear and certain terms: In 2012, the Indians expected to contend for first. For a while, they did. But now they are in last. And their place in the standings probably won’t be the last area of drastic change.

Some of the fans (like me) realize that Shapiro produced a team that was a game away from the World Series on a shoe string budget, and that Antonetti has worked under the same constraints for less time. We are fine with both of them sticking around a bit longer.

The team needs to be upfront about what they’re going to do, and what they’re going to do needs to be another rebuild, as horrible as that sounds. I realize this is a pretty big roll of the dice, but it’s time to think about building for the Lindor era. Generous projections have him ready by 2014, while most people say no later than 2015. That’s time enough to rebuild the farm system, particularly after dealing Perez, Choo, and Cabrera. I’m not sold on the need to move Masterson just yet and I find it hard to believe we’d get more than a bag of balls for Jimenez.

This also gives Carrasco at least a full season to return to form and finally live up to his potential. Assuming we hold on to Masterson, there’s two guys in the rotation right there. Chisenhall, Lindor, and Kipnis with a question mark (still) at first. Brantley in center with two more question marks in the outfield, but we’ve got two years to figure that out.

Suffering through a season like this is fine by me if I know it’s going to lead to something better — that’s why ’02 and ’03 weren’t a big deal and why, in theory, ’08-’10 weren’t, either. The truly depressing thing about this team isn’t just that they’re losing, but they’re losing with no positive end goal in mind.

Who ever wrote this is an ass also it’s not acta’s fault that the owners / front office don’t man up and blame them selves. That’s where it must change and you can change the coaches and managers all you want but if nothing changes up top then you won’t win. even if joe torre were manager he could not win with this bs of a front office and owner ship.

Rebuilding… find. But before they start, remember that the guys doing the trading thought Ubaldao Jimenez for TWO NUMBER ONE PICKS was a smart deal.
Fire Antonetti and Shapiro – and let the new GM decide about Manny.

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